Ruth Benedict

Beyond Relativity, Beyond Pattern

Virginia Heyer Young

Publication Year: 2005

Considered one of the most influential and articulate figures in American anthropology, Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) was trained by Franz Boas and Elsie Clews Parsons and collaborated with the equally renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, a student of hers with whom she was for a time romantically involved. When Benedict died suddenly at the age of sixty-one, she was popularly known for two best-selling works: Patterns of Culture, which became an exemplary model of the integration of societies, and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a study of Japanese culture commissioned by the U.S. government during World War II.

Benedict's lasting contribution to anthropology, however, cannot be appreciated solely through her more famous works. Equally innovative were her unpublished or little-noticed writings, which covered such topics as cross-cultural attributes of free societies, the national cultures of Thailand and Romania, and the comparison of Asian consensus politics with American political patterns. This biography by one of Benedict's last graduate students, Virginia Heyer Young, draws on these works, on Benedict’s correspondence and collaborative work with Margaret Mead, and on unpublished course notes. Young finds the ordering patterns in the rich materials Benedict left in her papers and demonstrates that Benedict was embarking on new interpretive directions in the last decade of her life—bringing her methods of holistic comparison to bear on contemporary cultures and on the dynamics of social cohesion. Benedict’s work, in fact, anticipated trends in anthropology in the decades to come by projecting a framework of individuals not only shaped by their culture but also using their culture for personal or collective objectives.

Young's arresting and nuanced portrait of Benedict in her last years leads one to wonder what direction American anthropology might have taken had Benedict completed the book she was working on at the time of her death.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Series Editors’ Introduction

Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture was a bestseller in 1934, catapulting its
author to prominence as an articulate spokesperson for examining different
cultural patternings. Her ability to write clearly and aesthetically opened
the insights of cultural anthropology...

Preface and Acknowledgments

I could never toss out my graduate school notes from Ruth Benedict’s courses.
They became eventually the beginning point for this book. In each culling
of my files for an office or house move, I threw out some of my Columbia
anthropology notes, but with just...

1. Ruth Benedict’s Life and Work

Ruth Benedict is a central figure in cultural anthropology, yet her thought
is generally known only by one book, Patterns of Culture, published in 1934,
fourteen years before her sudden death. Her later books...

2. The Search for Boas’s Successor

The lengthy process of replacement of the aging Franz Boas in the Columbia
University department of anthropology was significant in Ruth Benedict’s
career as well as in anthropological history. The history of these deliberations
during the 1930s has been recounted in the biographies...

3. Friendship with Margaret Mead

Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead wrote each other every few weeks or
oftener during Mead’s frequent field trips. The correspondence records the
dynamics of personal and intellectual encounter between these two quite
extraordinary persons...

4. Beyond Cultural Relativity

Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict designed a project in 1930 that would sponsor
fieldwork on North American Indians “with emphasis on . . . the reinterpretation
of culture traits that is unique for each cultural center.” Investigations
in at least ten...

5. Beyond Psychological Types

In the Office of War Information (owi), Benedict was assigned the problem
of discerning patterns in strategic cultures for general guidance in dealing
with their governments and providing specific knowledge that would predict
behavior under conditions expected...

6. Teachers and Students

After Franz Boas’s illness in 1931, he gave up many of his responsibilities, and
Ruth Benedict carried on the main work of administration and teaching.
She thus was a principal arbiter of a student’s fate, and their opinions of
her reflected this. Student accounts...

7. Ruth Benedict’s Contribution to Anthropology

Ruth Benedict remained interested in the big problems taken on by the
nineteenth-century anthropologists and in some of their modes of thought.
Although she taught and wrote mainly about the diversity of cultural behavior,
she was interested in the...

Appendixes

Introduction: Writing the Course “Texts”

From the beginning of her teaching career, Ruth Benedict’s responsibilities
had been to take over much of the teaching of cultural anthropology from
Franz Boas,who often alone, or with visiting faculty, had taught all four fields
and all culture...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.